Responding to the Evolving Needs of the Community: Introducing v1.2.1 of Ed-Fi Technology

The Ed-Fi Alliance is committed to continuously improving Ed-Fi technology. Today, thanks to input from the education community, we’re pleased to release v1.2.1, which features a number of enhancements.

Ed-Fi Alliance members—vendors, states and districts—provide valuable insights and actionable code improvements to drive the development of our technology so that we can fulfill our shared mission of improving student achievement. Today’s release is a testament to the benefits of that process.

Improvements? Check.Our open dialogue with the education sector enables the Ed-Fi Alliance to respond to the immediate needs of the community by updating the Ed-Fi data standard and development tools, improving the code-base, and supporting new use cases.

The key features of today’s v1.2.1 release are:

Performance enhancements, which reduce dashboard metric computation time by more than 50%. This significant performance optimization was achieved by:

Parallel processing of metric data

Eliminating repetitive reads to the database to increase performance times

Using stored procedures, which take advantage of the SQL Query Optimizer and advanced processing

A more detailed white paper on performance enhancements will be published in the next few weeks

Dashboard code improvements that allow users more flexibility to further customize school year and letter grade mapping capabilities and provide more support for the stability and maintainability of implementations

Ed-Fi technology users can find more information on the enhancements in the Ed-Fi GitHub repository (available to licensees only), including details on the total 72 improvements.

Comments RequestedOpen, two-way dialogue is critical as we strive to meet your needs and prioritize where we invest in improvements and enhancements to Ed-Fi technology. In the past, we have seen tremendous benefit in opening a Request for Comment (RFC) period to listen to your feedback regarding the Ed-Fi technology development. It’s time for the community to once again engage so our latest development plans are aligned to your goals.

We will open an RFC period for the Ed-Fi REST API development kit on June 2nd, 2014. The REST API development kit is a direct reflection of users’ expressed desire to update information in near-real-time and foster nimble application for educator use. Technically, it’s designed to enable applications to insert, update and retrieve data from an Ed-Fi Operational Data Store in a transactional and real-time manner, using a consistent interface. Capabilities that further unlock the hidden potential of data to support educators in their daily work with students.

We encourage you – education technology developers, product managers, licensees and industry leaders – to provide feedback that will shape those tools and benefit the entire development community through June 27th, 2014.

I hope you’ll participate by attending the webinars to discuss the architecture and implementation details and sharing your thoughts. Additional information is available at /ed-fi-restapi-rfc/.

We know the power that open communication can have – it shaped today’s release. It also ensures Ed-Fi technology enables interoperability across data and IT systems, and makes student data accessible and usable by educators. I invite you to join the conversation.